


Mess

by ZoeBug



Series: Cutting Shapes (and Side Pieces) [3]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Depression, Drabble, M/M, Mental Health Issues, POV Marco Bott, Side Pieces: Cutting Shapes, Takes place during chapter 10 of CS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-24
Updated: 2015-09-24
Packaged: 2018-04-23 05:53:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4865519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZoeBug/pseuds/ZoeBug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some days you’re the mess and some days you’re the broom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mess

**Author's Note:**

> A companion piece for my fic ["Cutting Shapes"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1853821) from Marco's POV.  
>   
> Takes place during (with spoilers for) chapter 10.  
>   
> Inspired by a quote from Rudy Francisco

I once was told while laying in sweat-soaked sheets with hair far past a week washed, staring up at the ceiling with empty eyes and apologizes flickering on cracked lips that some days you’re the mess and some days you’re the broom.

I’ve sure had my fair share of days where I was nothing but a collection of wrinkled dirty laundry and half-finished bowls of soup growing mold and dust motes gathering beneath furniture.

I know the feeling like the back of my hand. Like disgust and apathy. Like the kind of emptiness that still somehow feels cluttered. Like guilt.

I am an aficionado of mess days.

People may disagree but I think broom days are easier. Because on days when you’re a broom, it’s _someone else_ you’re helping. There is a sort of tranquility to helping someone else, a fulfillment and purpose of helping wash and tidy and sort when the each thing you touch is not yours. They’re lighter, easier to move when not weighted with thoughts of _your_ inadequacy; they are easier to clean when not caked with the residue of _your_ self-hatred. I revel in days when I can be a broom.

Because maybe if I get good enough at helping others it will change something.

I guess I sometimes think someone somewhere is keeping track. That maybe if I can tip some cosmic scale from “broken” and into “useful” some mystical debt will be repaid and things won’t be so hard.

Which is ridiculous, I know. This is not the kind of suffering you earn or pay off. It’s not the kind you “deserve.” It’s not the kind that “if you just stick through it” you’ll gain something from it in the end. This business of messes and brooms is nothing more than the undulation of chemicals and electrical impulses in my brain and there is no cosmic scale and no “deserving” and no one is keeping track but me.  

It hurts and it sucks and the dishes pile up and the clothes don’t get washed and I wonder if anything I do is worth a damn thing. It’s the kind of suffering that has no purpose and the thing you get for pushing through a mess day is that maybe tomorrow you’ll be a broom. And yet I still can’t help selfishly wishing it were otherwise. I’ve never done well with just accepting things are the way they are.

But then some days I’ve been a broom and a pair of hazel eyes has looked up at me with such wonder and conflicted gratefulness and I consider rethinking yet again. Because I could never call someone so beautiful, so kind, who suffers so, _so_ unfairly anything close to a mess.

But I’m different than him, I think. In him my ideas of weighing and deserving that would make things so much easier for me to take seem _frighteningly_ wrong. Because he is someone who should never be measured in such a way; _cannot_ be measured in such a way. He is brave and he is trying and he is so _unbearably_ kind and that in itself is so much more than my selfishness could ever be worth. In him I see how random this type of suffering is; how terrifying my imagined system of debts and merits becomes when I incorporate Jean.

Because if someone like him is still hurting and suffering and fighting his way through day by day, what hope would I ever have of convincing the universe I deserve not to.

And so I am trying to believe in messes and brooms without attaching anything to them. Because I can live in a world where I suffer due―for some reason or another―to deserving it. But I can’t bear to live in a world that thinks that of Jean. And so some days I am the mess and some days I am the broom.

But then there are certain days that come every once in a while. Hellish, awful days like today. They’re horrible, painful days when the rain hisses down in sheets through the gloomy air and I memorize every chip in the paint on Jean’s door and the absence of reply when I _desperately_ need one has never sounded more like the shattering of glass.

It’s on days like today when the mess you’re sweeping is your own and you feel each jagged edge as you clean with trembling hands and the beautiful, wonderful _anything_ -but-mess you are _hopelessly_ in love with is in pain and you are helpless to do a _damn thing_ about it.

Even when I accept there are some days when I’m the mess and some days when I’m the broom, it’s still hardest on days I have to be both.

**Author's Note:**

> [fanfic/podfic blog](http://zoe-bug.tumblr.com/) | [personal](http://xiexiecaptain.tumblr.com/) | [twitter](https://twitter.com/xiexiecaptain)


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